


Seek A Way Free

by Rainwater_Apothecary



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Don't remember if it had a sub-title i'll figure that out later, Fireproof games, M/M, The Room App, The Room Three, i'm not about to replay this game for the fourth time what are you talking about :3c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 12:13:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11161617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainwater_Apothecary/pseuds/Rainwater_Apothecary
Summary: Two men find themselves sucked into a realm of grueling puzzles and even darker implications. Will Junpei and Light find a way free from the GreyHolm?Okay if any of you like puzzle games then PLEASE play The Room series before reading this. (http://www.fireproofgames.com/games/the-room) There are some puzzle spoilers and I don't want to detract from anybody's enjoyment of this, the best app series I've ever played.





	Seek A Way Free

“Junpei.” The Japanese man turned to face the man gripping his shoulder. Light Field’s face darkened with thought. “I don’t like this.” 

The blind man’s concerns hardly fell on unhearing ears as Junpei took in the writhing doorway that had appeared the second he’d picked up the Craftsman’s Key from the sacrificial table. Air and dust particles created a faint whistling sound as the Void beckoned the men onward, hinting the end of their entrapment and the answers to all their questions. 

…if they would just… step… in.  
Light wouldn’t. A rustling noise closer than the tendrils of Null peeking from the newest doorway caught Junpei’s attention. 

“After all, we still have this.” Brown eyes narrowed to focus on the small disk-like object the pale man held aloft. _True, it **was** odd that they had any puzzle pieces unused before being given the next step… It just seemed wrong, somehow. But more than that… _

“Where did you even get that?” Light offered the item towards his partner at the disturbance Junpei’s arm made through the air as he reached forward.

“It was in the little slot below our friend Maggie.” He informed the other, referencing the odd fortune telling machine they’d found in the library. Junpei’s eyes widened. _Hadn’t he…?_

The corners of Light Field’s mouth tilted up in his signature know-it-all-and-proud-of-it look. Junpei fought the urge to roll his eyes as his companion filled him in on the machine’s role. 

“My guess is you pushed the slot in but didn’t pull it all the way out.” The long-faced man crossed his arms and waited patiently for his friend to crack. 

“Haha…” His smile took back over his face. 

“As I thought. And if we overlooked that little detail, odds are there are other things that bear looking into before we jump for a door that may not have a way back.” Their thoughts ran to the other doors they’d been travelling through all evening. While each had been unsettling, they had all contained a way back to where they’d started (if you managed to avoid getting your head knocked in by a giant birdcage because the blind man had decided to turn a key before warning Junpei of its suspected consequences…).

While they hoped that there wouldn’t be a way back and that the final door the odd hexagonal key had revealed would be their way out of this mess… it didn’t make sense for them to leave puzzles hanging if they weren’t getting the chance to come back to finish them. 

Then there was that business with Maggie…. Junpei couldn’t shake the chill that ran up his spine at the presence of a soothsayer in a box that shared a name with another woman the men had heard of. 

*+*+*

 _HE DECIEVES YOU_ sprouted from the fortuneteller’s box with a bang and ghostly handprints climbing into the seat a mechanical creature should inhabit alone. 

“Well.” Junpei sighed, the Craftsman’s eyepiece jumping as the muscle below his right eye twitched. 

“What is it Junpei? The automaton has ceased moving, it sounds like. Oh!” The man jumped slightly as a drawer with a smeared ectoplasmic handprint popped out of Maggie’s box and hit him behind the knee. 

“Now that’s interesting… Junpei, where have we seen something with this edge before?”  
Settling the eyepiece back into his front pocket, Junpei welcomed the distraction from the spectral torture he was beginning to suspect. He felt his teeth begin to show in a grin. 

“I believe it was right behind the room where we started this whole mess, my friend.”  
Light’s grin rose to match his.  
_They were **definitely** on the right track._

Tanned knuckles paled as Junpei fit the crank to the cell door that had haunted the space over their shoulder since they first landed in the Craftsman’s isle.  
“Take that, you bastard!” The overdramatic male grinned as the pieces slid together and rendered the doorway operable. 

“Yes…if I may, Junpei?” Snake, ever the somber one merely raised his eyebrows unseen by his jubilant companion. 

“Uh- Well- Yeah.” He finished lamely over the light creaking the metal grate gave off before admitting the two voyagers.  
.  
“Junpei… What is this place?” 

“It looks like a store room of some type.” 

“What on earth?” With an airlocking sound a drawer rolled from its berth quickly falling under the skillful fingers of the blind man. 

“Huh.” The Japanese man peeked over Snake’s shoulder long enough to get a gist of what he was working on before moving over to a queer set of filing cabinets that seemed, against all odds, to be already unlocked. 

“I hear electrodes powering up, am I correct?” Junpei pocketed the items his search had yielded and moved to the small panel that had begun to glow in the tracks of the other man’s tinkerings. 

“Yeah, and there’s a label here that says ‘library’.” 

“Interesting.” 

 

Upon being blessed with the somewhat long-winded review of why exactly three gramophones could be connected via sound to play said sound back, Light and Junpei Field held another handle and a token between them. 

With another ominous custom tarot reading hanging over their heads, the boys set to work.  
“It sounds almost like- Junpei, be quiet.” 

Upon having been the member of the party to describe a self-contained world within a pop up book, the Tenmyouji-Field was more than willing to let his partner take over the odd flip-flopping files.

He had still yet to recover from the chills the sight of more spectral handprints in the library had given him. 

And he still had to explain those to Light. 

Joy. 

“So you’re saying that some other entity who remains unseen to us has gotten into the habit of leaving you clues? If I didn’t know the situation better I would question your faith in my suspension of disbelief.” The thoughtful scowl was back on the taller man’s face as he perched one elbow in his hand. 

The man with the eyepiece just shrugged, the sounds of his overcoat brushing the brass near his shoulder alerting his lover to the motion. 

Light Field sighed. 

“Very well, if our mysterious benefactor says up, then up we might as well go.”  
Junpei shrugged. It was better than nothing. 

“That’s odd.” Given the sheer number of times those words had been uttered by both parties in the past few hours, one would be mistaken in the assumption that they failed to gain the other’s attention despite their repetition. “Was this embossment here when we came through last?” 

Junpei’s eyebrows buried themselves in his rough bangs. Another shrug. 

“Finding anything?” He asked, studying the pale man’s face as his fingers ghosted around the filigreed medallion set into the tower’s banister. 

“It’s vaguely loose, but still anchored in. Odd.” There it was again. 

Although this time Junpei caught something in the only place Light couldn’t: out the corner of his eye. 

“Do that again, Light. Please.” A silver, quirked eyebrow answered his query but he did what was requested. 

The shorter man grinned. 

“Can I try?” 

“I’m not sure that’s-“ 

“Cool, thanks.” Shouldering into his best friend, the brunette took the wheel. 

Or trackpad. 

The chandelier began to move. Snake’s eyebrows hid higher in his own unkempt fringe. 

Yep, sure enough, the heavy lighting fixture the handprint had pointed out was moving, pendulum like, in time with Junpei’s finger. 

 

 _CRASH_

 

“Woops.” 

A heavy sigh sounded over Junpei’s right shoulder. 

“Well I suppose that’s _one_ way to empty the safe…” 

Light Field didn’t have to see in order to know the sheepish grin that was spreading across his husband’s face. 

This was why the Craftsman would no longer have nice things once they were through. 

Well, that and his implied imprisonment of innocent charlatans. Light still didn’t particularly know what to make of her. 

He hoped it was nothing, though ‘nothing’ was perhaps not the safest term in their present circumstance. 

With a shake of his head the man followed his lover’s footsteps back into the makeshift elevator, grateful for once in his life that he could not see the face of the woman behind the booth. 

.

 

Upon blinking bleary eyes two sets of footsteps slid and tripped over themselves in a race against the bloodthirsty tendrils of darkness that had hitherto only revealed doorways, not followed the men through the portals they marked. 

“Junpei!” The blind man shouted into the darkness of his vision to get a handhold on his lover’s whereabouts. “Anything we can use?”

“Uh- Oh shit!” With the sound of wood scraping against wood the taller man found himself dragged by the arm into what felt like a boat of some sort. 

The bruising on their ribs from their crash landing on a set of benches would heal. The Greyholm would not be so lucky. 

With a great CRACK and the sounds of surf and sea the mysterious prison came crumbling into the earth from which it sprang. Junpei could only watch mouth agape as the tendrils widened and shot skyward only to be demolished and buried beneath the stones that had been the two men’s home for the past …days? Weeks? Shaking his head the Japanese man struggled to sit up in the rowboat, shifting the other man from where he’d landed on Junpei’s leg. 

As the massive dust cloud settled on the hillock in the middle of the sea natural sounds began to filter through the chaos and the sky faded from its glowing yellow to a sickly green before smoothing into a natural blue. Light Field’s brow crinkled as he raised his head to listen to a distant seagull. 

 

“Well that…” 

“Yeah.” 

“Let’s avoid such situations in the future, yes?”

“Agreed.” 

Though avoiding a train would be nigh on impossible, should a letter or a box appear before them, the two would most definitely look the other way. 

 

Especially when the news of their travels filtered back to them stating that their final stop, the Greyholm, existed in no living records. Had they not been there and walked its eerie halls before hearing it all come crashing down, they would be two more in the innocent masses. 

As it stood, with the gnawing hunger for knowledge about the Null fading with their exact memories of the Holm, the men were willing enough to fade into the lack of living memory of the place that had heralded the deaths of numerous explorers and fools alike. 

 

Which wasn’t to say that Junpei and Light Tenmyoji-Field were not a hearty mixture of both.

**Author's Note:**

> Still salty about not being able to open the safe the normal way. 
> 
>  
> 
> (They’d get the Lost ending, but I’m giving them the Escape ending bc…………………………………….because I like the idea of them falling over one another and waking up in a rowboat together I’m trash.)


End file.
